Fit to Print: Kaggle News Recap

There's been a flurry of activity on the site lately, with three new competitions, new results to report and three big media pieces on Kaggle competitions!

New Competitions

DON'T GET KICKED
Our newest competition, Don't Get Kicked, requires participants to figure out which used cars bought at auction have a higher risk of being ‘kicked’ – returned for faults or tampering – using easily-understood features like vehicle model, odometer reading and location of sale. The prize pool for this competition is $10,000.

SEMI-SUPERVISED FEATURE LEARNING
D Sculley of Google Research's competition, Semi-Supervised Feature Learning, requires participants to ‘feature engineer’ a dataset with approximately one million features into a lower dimensional space of no more than 100 features. The results of this competition will be included in a paper submitted to the 2011 NIPS workshop on deep learning and unsupervised feature learning.GIVE ME SOME CREDIT
Banks use credit scoring algorithms which guess an applicant’s probability of default when deciding whether to lend to applicants, and on what terms. The Give Me Some Credit competition features a previously unreleased dataset which gives competitors a rare opportunity to analyze credit data containing records on 250,000 borrowers. The prize pool is $5,000 in total: $3,000 for first, $1,500 for second and $500 for third.

Recent Results

DUNNHUMBY SHOPPER CHALLENGE
The dunnhumby Shopper Challenge has been won by Russian computer science professor Alexander D'yakonov. Alexander’s solution is available on the Kaggle forum. In second place was Neil Schneider, an actuary based in Indianapolis (Neil's solution), followed by Ben Hamner of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. We'll be posting interviews with each of the top competitors over the next couple of weeks.

Kaggle in the News

WSJ AND POPULAR SCIENCE ON THE NASA COMPETITION
The Mapping Dark Matter competition continues to attract attention months after it finished. The Wall Street Journal and Popular Science Magazine have both published articles focusing on the winners, David Kirby and Daniel Margala, and top performers Martin O'Leary, Ali Hassaïne and Eu Jin Loc.